• POLITICAL VIOLENCE“This Will Not End Here”: A Scholar Explains Why Charlie Kirk’s Killing Could Embolden Political Violence

    By Arie Perliger

    “Political assassinations come in waves. We see that not only in the United States but other countries. I’ve looked at political assassinations in many democracies, and one of the things I see in a fairly consistent manner is that political assassinations create a process of escalation that encourages others on the extreme political spectrum to feel the need to retaliate. And that is my main concern,” says University of Massachusetts Lowell scholar Arie Perliger, who studies political violence and assassinations.

  • POLITICAL VIOLENCEAre Political Assassinations on the Rise? A Criminologist Weighs in on the Shooting Death of Charlie Kirk

    By Tanner Stening

    James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist, says there has been a rise in politically motivated killings, attempted killings and partisan threats —even though the overall fatalities remains a small number.

  • EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLINGThe President Should Not Have a License to Kill

    By David J. Bier

    The administration claims that the “war” on drugs justifies extrajudicial killing. But redefining civilian drug criminals as “combatants” gives away the reality: the government just militarized what was a low-level criminal law enforcement incident outside the United States. Once we consider the victims’ alleged illegal actions, we can see that the government committed the most egregious crime here.

  • THE MILITARY & DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENTGovernors Split Over Mobilizing National Guard as Trump Seeks More Troops

    By Jonathan Shorman

    Republican governors want National Guard members to help ICE, in addition to deploying to Washington.

  • EXTREMISMRaised for the Reich: White Supremacists Are Recruiting Teens for On-the-Ground Action

    White supremacists have a long history of trying to recruit youths to join their movement as a means of filling their ranks and maintaining relevancy. The ubiquity of social media in young people’s lives means that today there are many opportunities for white supremacists to reach youths with their content and recruit them to their cause.

  • ARGUMENT: ON DOING NOTHINGStanding Around in Washington, D.C.

    What, exactly, is the National Guard really doing in Washington, D.C.? Benjamin Wittes writes in Lawfare that they just stand around. “This deployment isn’t really about doing anything. It’s not going to do anything about D.C.’s crime problem, though I’m sure the president will make up whatever numbers he needs to claim otherwise.” The answer is: “It’s a way of showing who owns whom. And doing it over nothing, for no reason other than that the president can do it, shows who’s boss in a way that doing it for a reason never could.”

  • TERRORISMTehran’s Homeland Option: Terror Pathways for Iran to Strike in the United States

    By Matthew Levitt

    The 12-day Iran war may be over, but the threat of Iranian reprisal attacks now looms large, and will for the foreseeable future.In addition to attacking U.S. targets around the world, Iranian operatives or their agents could also attempt to carry out attacks inside the United States, leveraging what U.S. counterterrorism officials have describe as a “homeland option” developed over years.

  • EXTREMISMActive Clubs Aare White Supremacy’s New, Dangerous Frontier

    By Art Jipson

    Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.

  • SERIAL KILLERSWhy Was Pacific Northwest Home to So Many Serial Killers?

    By Jacob Sweet

    Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, George Russell, Israel Keyes, and Robert Lee Yates were serial killers who grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the shadow of smelters which spewed plumes of lead, arsenic, and cadmium into the air. As a young man, Charles Manson spent ten years at a nearby prison, where lead has seeped into the soil. The idea of a correlation between early exposure to lead and higher crime rates is not new. Fraser doesn’t explicitly support the lead-crime hypothesis, but in a nimble, haunting narrative, she argues that the connections between an unfettered pollution and violent crime warrant scrutiny.

  • DEMOCRCY WATCHOn Nonexistent Crime “Emergencies”: Trump’s Politicization of the National Guard

    By Patrick G. Eddington

    What Trump is doing now has nothing to do with “crime control” because the DC murder and crime rate is the lowest it’s been in literally decades. These out-of-state National Guard call-ups from Red states are designed to intimidate elected Democrats in major metropolitan areas under the guise of “fighting crime” and alleged immigration enforcement. Trump’s use of Title 32 authority to do this is a misuse of the statute, designed to get around the Posse Comitatus Act so he can use military personnel under the control of Trump loyalist governors for what can only be truthfully characterized as de facto political repression ops. 

  • POLICINGWhat Would a More Effective Policing Strategy Look Like in D.C.?

    By Chip Brownlee for The Trace

    We spoke with crime prevention expert David Kennedy about the Trump administration’s takeover of law enforcement in the nation’s capital, and the tactics that might prove more effective.

  • POLICINGThe Data Doesn’t Support Trump’s Justification for Deploying the National Guard

    By Chip Brownlee and Jennifer Mascia for The Trace

    The president has taken over policing in Washington, D.C., and threatened to do the same in other Democratic-led cities. An analysis by The Trace shows that his claims of runaway violence are false.

  • SCHOOL SAFETYProtecting Mental and Emotional Health of Students During Active Shooter Drill Practices

    New report calls for a unified policy and research agenda to ensure the mental, emotional, and behavioral health and well-being of students and school staff when conducting active shooter drills.

  • CRIMEU.S. Crime Rates Fell Nationwide in 2024: FBI Report

    By Amanda Hernández

    Violent crime fell by 4.5% last year, including a nearly 15% drop in homicides.Property crime dropped 8.1% from the previous year.

  • CRIMEThe CDC Shooting Was a Matter of Time, Health Experts Say

    By Fairriona Magee for The Trace

    “A lot of the current political rhetoric is not a good-faith discussion or debate, but outright labeling of other humans as somehow evil and not worthy of walking the earth,” says Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health. In a conversation with The Trace, she notes that “It is almost inevitable that when you combine evil rhetoric with isolation, lack of support for physical and mental health, and lack of ability to temporarily remove a firearm from someone who has the intent to kill, that we’re gonna end up with tragedies.”